If you read blogs about bikes you likely saw how Seattle’s DOT installed a dozen and a half bike racks in a place nobody would lock a single bike, let alone dozens of bikes. SDOT did this, quite obviously, to block homeless people from camping in the location, as everyone figured out pretty quickly.

Condemnation from the bike community was swift, but it was circumstantial at best.

The urban bike community of the western world has struggled with its image as male, white, and affluent. Such is often not the case, but nothing reinforces this stereotype like some salaried tech industry bike bro complaining about the homeless camps he had to look at on his commute to work.

Trying to grasp the interplay between the US homeless crisis and the capital housing market can be a tad tricky at times. So often homelessness is viewed as the fallout of addiction or bad life choices, or the after affect of incarceration.

After the housing market crash which saw hundreds of thousands of Americans lose their homes, a large number of which were illegal foreclosures, we saw suddenly this overlap between the speculated value of a house and the often violent eviction of law-abiding home owners.

Not much happened in retaliation at first. Not until a couple years later when Occupy Wall Street ramped up did a true mass movement against criminal banks and reckless landlords finally connect in the public’s mind our perverse induced scarcity of resources where in fact none actually exists.

Those people you see sleeping on benches would be housed in a just and equitable society, and we wouldn’t have to build a damn thing.

Streetwise is a 1984 documentary film by director Martin Bell. It followed in the wake of a July 1983 Life magazine article, “Streets of the Lost”, by writer Cheryl McCall and photographer Mary Ellen Mark, Bell’s wife.

When an allegedly intoxicated driver plowed into crowds of pedestrians in the heart of Times Square today, you’d be forgiven for thinking this isn’t something that happens all the time in New York. Alas, you’d be wrong. Even in the densest city in America cars are allowed to race around at lethal speeds. The solution from police is of course to crack down on jaywalkers, with predictably bloody results.

But since this collision (we still don’t say accident) mowed down so many in what’s essentially a giant public plaza, the BREAKING-NEWS-AT-ALL-TIMES!!! mainstream media ran with lines about “Terrorism”, or at the very least “might not be terrorism”. We just don’t know!

Half an hour in, they were eagerly alerting us that this was, unfortunately, not an act of terrorism, just a regular act of traffic violence. But then readers of this blog and other livable street advocates declared aloud, ‘Well, it IS actually still kind of terrorism.’

To the shock of everyone with a soul and a conscience, several city counselors have caved to xenophobic business interests to defy their own vote, as well as the predominant will of the people.

The Chamber via email cited “concern” that our president would punish sanctuary cities by withholding federal funding. But anyone with a brain knows this is an empty threat. Trump’s already DOA budget is going nowhere with funding missing for local jurisdictions. Congressional reps will never vote for a budget that will punish their districts. Threats to cut federal aid to city law enforcement made by Attorney General Jeff Sessions have also been debuffed as meritless.

On Martin Luther King Day it was reported an infant, possibly only hours old, had died in a homeless camp near a bus stop in downtown Portland, Oregon. First responders rushed the baby to OHSU, but it was too late. Reports were inconclusive as to whether the child was in fact stillborn, or died shortly after in what has become one of the most severe winters in what’s normally a very mild boreal climate.

This is certainly a tragic confluence of lack of mental health and homeless services, as well as an immediate incapability to shelter Portland’s thousands of homeless people when temperatures take a sudden plunge.

Statues of living figures are forbidden in Israel, as are other forms of political speech normally protected throughout the first world. Hardly unpopular, a 2014 survey by the Israeli Democracy Institute found 46% of Israelis believed “public criticism” of Israel should be banned.

The prospect of car-free cities, or at the very least car-free streets in dense downtowns has been a goal of livable street advocates for decades. Their reasons revolve around safety and social connectivity, citing the envelope of harm and loss of humanity created in places overrun with automobile traffic. Rarely do such advocates talk about getting rid of cars for their most dangerous side effect: carbon emissions.

Climate justice advocates are heavily focused on the fossil fuel industry, occasionally pointing out the role of animal agriculture in creating climate change, but almost never criticize the automobile industry itself, or personal fossil fuel use by those driving cars.

That needs to change. We cannot expect to hobble the fossil fuel industry while continuing to provide them with an endless demand for their product.

From the event page: “Currently over 200 cities worldwide have established on-going and highly popular Open Streets events. The recent surge in cities creating temporary street parks is widely credited to Ciclovía, a weekly event in Bogotá, Colombia that opens over 70 of miles of city streets to citizens for outdoor physical activity. This event beginning in the mid-1970s and continues to this day with tremendous success attracting up to 2 million participants weekly.”

Detroit’s route stitched together two of the city’s most iconic neighborhoods: Corktown and Mexicantown, running in a single strip down Michigan ave with a slight jog onto Vernor. Along the route were your typical event staples like bouncy castles, foursquare, art making, and children exploring their newfound streetscape.

Businesses enjoyed a splurge of foot traffic, and utilized the additional space on many blocks by extending their merchandise beyond the confines of the narrow sidewalk. No longer constrained by cars, sidewalk chalk could be seen everywhere, containing everything from kids’ drawings to anti-gentrificaion slogans to quickly washed-off vulgarities.

There’s a perception that the housing crash of 2008 halted suburban sprawl. In some places, it did just that. But we’re almost ten years past that epoch, and the home builders associations have been lobbying like they always do for more construction in placeless environs where silly things like public transit or public squares remain unthinkable.

Still too are marketing shills paid to intertwine the idea of upward mobility with urban flight as somehow still being a positive thing. Take this cringe-worthy quote from Ford Motor Company chief sales analyst Erich Merkle on CNN: “[Millennials] might be able to hold off for a period of time, but at some point they will have families, move to the suburbs, and they are going to purchase many, many new cars.”